Being a former Second World War partisan: reported speech and the expression of local identity

This paper presents a qualitative analysis of narrative sequences extracted from a sample of semistructured interviews to a group of former Second World War partisans living in the Camonica valley (in the province of Brescia), for a total of roughly 15 hours of recordings. The analysis combines the interpretative frameworks of conversation analysis and interactional sociolinguistics with the study of reported speech and of the strategies of voice representation in dialogic and narrative texts. Special attention is devoted to the use of code-switching as a ‘contextualisation cue’ (Gumperz 1982) in order to mark portions of reported speech and set them off from the surrounding talk or from the main flow of a narrative episode, even in the absence of explicit recourse to verba dicendi or other quotation devices. Our findings show that code-switching may serve as a quotative marker, whereby speakers index the beginning of the reported utterances and shape the characters alternating in a dialogic sequence by drawing on the various linguistic resources at their disposal.